BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Like many other movie stars, Sandra Bullock has been endlessly sliced
into tidbits by the celebrity media. •
Vanity Fair calls the Oscar-winning actress “friendly and direct and so unpretentious.”
(True.)

• Dozens of color-by-number profiles describe her as “America’s sweetheart,” as a gifted
physical comedian who has suffered the occasional flop. (Fair enough.)

After her 2010 divorce, she briefly got the tabloid treatment, with one article accompanied by
the headline “Sandra Bullock Finally Leaves the House — Looking Like the Witch From She-Ra.”
(Doubtful.)

Yet one of her most noteworthy attributes is rarely mentioned, perhaps because it isn’t readily
noticed on camera.

A look behind her performances, though, reveals that Bullock — who will return to theaters on
Oct. 4 in the space thriller
Gravity — is arguably Hollywood’s gutsiest A-list actress.

The 2002 romantic comedy
Two Weeks Notice might not scream “fearless,” but, shortly after, Bullock abruptly steered
away from what was working, instead fighting for smaller dramatic roles that were, at times,
unflattering. (Her role as a well-off racist in
Crash comes to mind.)

The perilous professional shift led her to
The Blind Side (2009), a difficult film that could have easily turned into a Lifetime
melodrama. Instead, it won her an Academy Award.

Last year, Bullock, 49, appeared naked in a long, raunchy skit on
Chelsea Lately.

And, she almost drowned when she took a daring leap into the North Atlantic in 2009 to film a
scene for
The Proposal. After bobbing in the water for take after take, she began suffering from
hypothermia.

“I’d put her toughness against any tough-guy actor out there,” said Todd Lieberman, a
Proposal producer.

Still not convinced?
Gravity should change that.

The film — directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuaron, the meticulous filmmaker behind
Children of Men and
Y Tu Mama Tambien, both critical darlings — stars Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts
adrift in space after surviving a shuttle accident. But it is largely a solo performance by Bullock
in the way that
Cast Away rested squarely on Tom Hanks, securing him an Oscar nomination in the process.
Clooney appears in only about a third of the film.

“I actually never thought about being alone on screen for such a long time until I started doing
press, and everyone asked me if that made me nervous, and then I started panicking,” Bullock said
last month.

Cuaron created a cinematic torture device for the filming — a 10-foot-by-14-foot box equipped
with special lights and placed on a darkened soundstage. Bullock was “clamped” into a “gruesome”
harness, Cuaron said, and placed inside, where she remained isolated for hours at a stretch. A
camera mounted on a robotic arm pivoted and circled around her. The newly developed technology made
it look as if Bullock were floating through the darkness of space.

“I was literally acting off nothing for up to 10 hours a day, with headphones my only connection
to Alfonso,” she said. “We made a catalog of music clips — whale sounds, Radiohead, weird
screeching of metal — and I memorized them. I would say, ‘OK, give me No. 4. That’s not working.
Try No. 2. That’s better, that’s getting me to the emotion I need.’ ”

To film one sequence, Bullock had to stay perfectly still and in character while a camera rushed
toward her at 25 mph, stopping only about an inch from her face.

Other scenes required her to be strung up horizontally by 12 wires while puppeteers maneuvered
her through choreographed movements.

“I got into it and didn’t last 20 seconds,” Cuaron said of the contraption.

Gravity, with its edge-of-your-seat intensity and simultaneous sense of claustrophobia and
expansiveness, knocked out critics on the opening night late last month of the Venice Film
Festival.

“Bullock is aces in by far the best film she’s ever been in,” Todd McCarthy wrote in
The Hollywood Reporter.

The 3-D film is also notable for its originality — dispensing with a male lead is no small
decision — and short running time of 90 minutes.

“It’s about rebirth,” Bullock said. “How do you let go in the worst possible situation so you
can have some kind of release and peace?”

There is a sense that Bullock might feel as if she has something to prove with
Gravity. The moviegoing masses still seem to have a flicker of doubt that she earned her
Oscar, perhaps because her first big movie after winning it was
The Heat.

“It’s hard not to feel that this brand of deeply forgettable fare is beneath Bullock,”
Texas Monthly wrote of
The Heat.

“What roles that are available will always be a factor,” said Octavia Spencer, an Oscar winner
for
The Help and a friend of Bullock’s since 1996, when they met on the set of
A Time To Kill.

“But Sandy has been very successful at not letting anyone put her in a box, and that will
continue.”